Publications

Enrique Antonio Mejía. 2025. Productivity and plunder: Soybean frontier expansion and soil nutrient loss in the Argentine countryside. Doctoral Thesis in Economic History at Stockholm University. Department of Economic History and International Relations.

This compilation thesis investigates how Argentina’s rapid soybean expansion since the 1970s has fueled economic growth while causing significant environmental and social consequences, particularly soil nutrient loss. Existing research has overlooked critical gaps, including the under-representation of historical analyses connecting past agricultural expansion (primarily led by wheat) to current soybean dynamics, limited integ...

Mads Ejsing. 2025. Re-Assembling Democracy: A Nascent Theory of Nonhuman Political Participation. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory. https://doi.org/10.3167/th.2025.7218303

This article explores the concepts of political participation through the lens of new materialism and critical democratic theory. It argues that the concept of political participation must be expanded beyond rational and reflective actions by human beings in order to better encompass the agency of nonhuman entities. Drawing on the work of Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Noortje Marres, and others, the article offers a new theoreti...

Fernando Racimo, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Rebecca Leigh Rutt, Mads Ejsing. 2025. Degrowth and decolonisation in academia. Degrowth Journal. https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.01.09

Like other societal institutions, academia today faces an existential crisis. Rising inequality and authoritarianism, coupled with climate breakdown and collapsing ecosystems, are threatening the conditions under which academic knowledge is produced and shared. At the same time, academics are coming to terms with their institutions’ role in contributing to these processes, particularly in the Global North. Many are recognising...

Stephan Lutter, Victor Maus, Sebastian Luckeneder, Michael Tost. 2025. Increasing Water Use in Global Copper Production Threatens Freshwater Availability. Ecological Economic Papers. https://doi.org/10.57938/441b6e21-b914-4565-a2af-623f78ed92c6

Water input in copper mining varies substantially across sites worldwide, with implications for local sustainable resource management. We quantify water use in global copper mining at unprecedented spatial resolution, using machine learning to estimate site-level water withdrawal and identify geographic hotspots of pressure on water resources. Results reveal that global water intensity is two-fold higher than previously known....

Erica von Essen, Henriette Wathne Gelink, Helene Figari, Olve Krange. 2025. The beast from the east: Preparing for cross-border wild boars in Norway. Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104421

Managing migrating species is a geobiopolitical undertaking: with this is meant that administrating life (and death) across borders has political implications between neighboring countries. When a species immigrates, or is moved anthropogenically, its sudden presence can trigger defensive-nativist responses from its new destination. Sometimes its mere risk is enough to generate anxiety. This is true both of invasive alien spec...

Hanna L. Pettersson, Erica Von Essen. 2025. Now What? The Conundrum of Successful Recovery of Wolves and Other Species for European Conservation. Conservation Letters. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.13143

The recent decision to downlist the wolf from a “strictly protected” to “protected” status in the Bern Convention and Habitats Directive marks a turning point for European conservation. While reflecting wolves' recovery, the shift has illuminated a conundrum within existing conservation frameworks: No species has ever been downlisted before, despite a remarkable wildlife comeback over recent decades. Moreover, the downlisting ...

Henriette Wathne Gelink, Erica von Essen. 2025. Wild boar management in Norway – a system of selective prioritization and conflicting inter-governmental opinions. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2025.2524839

Invasive species cause global challenges with massive long-term impacts, and reduction of impacts relies on both international and local interventions. At national level, mismatches between how AIS are classified and managed, and how different governmental bodies deal with these species, produce a messy reality of changeable standards for the species and the people who are expected to manage them. We explore such mismatches th...

Erica von Essen, Emily Wanderer, Gabriel Lennon, Karin Ahlberg. 2025. The wild workforce: Enlisting non-human labor in invasive species management. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241300941

An all-hands-on-deck rationality appears to characterize invasive alien species (IAS) eradication. Not only are citizens enrolled in their monitoring and management to extend authorities’ capabilities, but a recent trend in so-called nature-based solutions also outsources labor to non-human species. Within the realm of biocontrol initiatives, these non-human actors are strategically enlisted to counter invasive species through...

Erica von Essen, Manisha Bhardwaj. 2025. Fence and Fencibility: Using Technology to Direct Wildlife. Fences and Biosecurity: The Politics of Governing Unruly Nature. https://doi.org/10.33134/hup-30-8

We examine the virtual fence in terms of how it communicates with wildlife about interspecies boundaries. This is done using a biosemiotic point of departure, which regards interventions as communicative devices tailored to be ‘read’ by wild animal sensory perceptions ( Umwelten ). Having synthesised some current uses of such technologies in wildlife management, our chapter shows how wires cross in miscommunication across spe...

Melissa Barton, Dheaya Alrousan, Luis Fernando Perez-Mercado, Sahar Dalahmeh, Anastasija Vasiljev, Jan-Olof Drangert, Prithvi Simha, Melissa A. Barton, Melissa A. Barton, Melissa A. Barton. 2025. Attitudes toward urine-derived water and dry fertilizer: Data from a university survey in Jordan. Mendeley Data. https://doi.org/10.17632/3N752W8G6X.1

This file accompanies the Mendeley Data deposit “Attitudes toward urine-derived water and dry fertilizer: Data from a university survey in Jordan” and contains an index to all data and supplemental files. Analysis and study context are described further in “Clean enough? Public acceptance of urine-derived water and dry fertilizer shaped by religious and social norms in a water-scarce Islamic context” (Barton et al., submitted ...